Short Summary

In Spain, Police colleagues and other mourners attended the memorial service in San Sebastian on Wednesday (6 December) for the three police officers gunned down in a bar in the city on Tuesday (5 December).

Description

In Spain, Police colleagues and other mourners attended the memorial service in San Sebastian on Wednesday (6 December) for the three police officers gunned down in a bar in the city on Tuesday (5 December). Police blamed the killings on Basque Nationalist terrorists, and they suggested the action was a warning to Basques to stay away from the following day's (6 December) vote on Spain's new constitution.

SYNOPSIS: Even as Spaniards flocked to the polls to give overwhelming approval to the new Constitution, mourners awaited the arrival of the dead officers on the steps of Buen Pastor Church in San Sebastian. Their deaths brought to 52 the number of assassinations of policemen this year, all blamed by the authorities on gunmen of ETA, the Basque separatist organisation. There was a strong police presence as the flag-draped coffins were carried into the church.

The three murdered men were killed as they were having pre-lunch off-duty drinks. They were in civilian clothes. Only days earlier a Civil Guardsman was gunned down in a cafe in the Basque town of Onate.

The three officers killed were a police chief, a police inspector and a municipal policemen. They were in a bar with about 12 other customers when three youths with pistols burst in and shouted to the other customers to get on the floor. They then opened fire. Although the authorities immediately put checks on all roads around the city, no trace of them was found. Their three victims were accorded full service honours before their separate burials.